Reimagining resilience for systemic risks: Enhancing community preparedness through counterfactual thinking of past disaster impacts

Conventional risk assessment frameworks are effective for discrete hazards but have critical limitations when addressing systemic risks that propagate through interconnected socio-technical systems. This study aims to establish a systematic application of counterfactual thinking as an analytical framework for deriving generalisable principles of community resilience across diverse hazard contexts. Five major disasters spanning 2009–2021, namely the Aude floods (2018), L'Aquila earthquake (2009), Manchester Arena attack (2017), Tōhoku earthquake-tsunami (2011), and COVID-19 pandemic, were examined using upward counterfactuals that explored enhanced-preparedness scenarios and downward counterfactuals that assessed worst-case cascading-failure pathways. Cross-case thematic analysis, validated through multi-stakeholder expert focus groups, identified three higher-order vulnerability categories: structural vulnerabilities, including institutional fragmentation and trust erosion; operational deficiencies, encompassing response capacity limitations and infrastructure cascade susceptibilities; and adaptive capacity fragilities, where cultural knowledge systems and community self-organisation remain underdeveloped. Findings demonstrate that systemic risks arise not only from hazard characteristics but also from interactions among institutional structures, information ecosystems, and temporal vulnerabilities, which current frameworks inadequately address. Six evidence-based community resilience principles are derived, emphasising cross-sectoral governance coordination, institutional trust-building, deliberate infrastructure redundancy, cultural knowledge preservation, compound-scenario planning, and inclusive preparedness, providing actionable guidance for communities navigating increasingly complex, interconnected risk landscapes.